2.91 Alpha Stages

[Jay]

LVP 2.90 was in development for a few months. Despite containing a shit load of new features, fixes, rewrites and clean ups, it also introduced a lot of bugs. We've released 38 builds of 2.90 and there are still bugs being found everyday. The beta testing of 2.90 was a complete failure. (I know I know, it was my fault so I can't complain)

I think the way we are testing things needs to change. Currently (most of us) write a feature, and test it out once or twice with the beta team, commit, and call it done.

I know 2.91 won't be as big a release as 2.90, but I reckon we should develop 2.91 in Alpha stages. Each Sunday release a new stage along with an updated changelog containing several fixes / features, giving the beta team a full week to test everything out and give feedback. We need to be a lot stricter when recruiting beta testers. We need to find people who are willing to go ingame for at least 1 hour of every day, and test every feature out from that weeks update. Obviously we should still test features as we develop them, but I think if we do it like this it will increase the stability of the final version.

This needs to be sorted out quickly. At the moment we don't have a beta team.

Thoughts?

[Wesley]

I have been thinking about this too. I think this doesn't only apply to 2.91 or even just testing. Development should be done in different stages as well. These stages should be decided before actually developing. These stages are 'milestones' on trac, different should be added including a deadline. Then tickets should be assigned to these different milestones. The tickets will have to be completed before the milestone's deadline. After a milestone has been completed it should be tested. It's easy to see on trac which things have changed, all of these should then be tested.

Using this system should greatly improve the planning, which also makes it easier to test.